The old adage ‘where some people see problems, others see opportunities’ might be how the new venture io oil & gas consulting sees the current marketplace.

Of course creating an entity like io - a 50/50 joint venture between McDermott International and GE Oil & Gas - takes time in gestation, so the process began long before the current oil price crash.

According to CEO Dan Jackson - who joined the McDermott world two years ago when the American company acquired DeepSea Engineering & Management (SEN, 30/1) - the birth of io was borne more out of the frustration with the project ‘hiatus’ that began when cost escalation hit new developments.

The raison d’etre for io is to ‘leverage’ - a word straight out of the GE playbook - the experience of the two parents across the field development landscape to create a new front-end company whose aim is to help operators create a ‘clearer blueprint’ for their projects.

There is an anomaly, though. Io - whose name comes either from the moon of Jupiter, ‘independent-operations’ or maybe even input-output - wants both to be seen to share the expertise of its parents in subsea hardware, fabrication and installation, while still being independent. Tough call.

Jackson believes that the expertise to bring down project costs lies with contractors who understand better than operators the breadth of development challenges. He thinks that operators need more certainty on costs before they get to their key decision gate, FID - financial investment decision.

Io, which will be based in central London to take advantage of its attraction to draw in talent, is led by Jackson and chief technology officer Mark Dixon from McD side and Tony McAloon and Oliver Dixon- no relation to Mark - COO and CFO, respectively from GE. McAloon is actually a recent recruit from Baker Hughes who may (or may not) have jumped ship in the wake of the Halliburton takeover.

The plan is eventually to have a workforce ‘in the hundreds’ which might have seem difficult some time ago, but might be possible now if other companies begin shedding staff.